The gruesome horror movie inspired by Tom Hanks: “That was definitely a touch point”
Although Tom Hanks technically made his debut in a horror film called He Knows You’re Alone, his name will probably never bring up any associations to the genre whenever it is mentioned in a conversation. His filmography has primarily been defined by other kinds of projects, ranging from war movies like Saving Private Ryan to comedies such as Forrest Gump.
However, in the contemporary landscape of horror filmmaking, where artists are routinely finding inspiration from all kinds of sources, it’s Hanks who inspired a recent film by one of the most currently talked-about horror directors. The filmmaker in question is none other than Osgood Perkins, who generated a lot of conversation with his 2024 work Longlegs, featuring one of the most bizarre performances of Nicolas Cage’s career, which is definitely saying something.
Although Perkins has proven his directorial chops with earlier movies like The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it didn’t end up working out for the 2025 horror comedy The Monkey. Revolving around the titular cursed toy monkey, it’s structured like a tribute to beloved B-movies with similar conceits, but it fails to be scary enough or funny enough, resulting in a disappointing new entry to Perkins’ filmography.
Starring Theo James in a dual role as identical twins engaged in a conflict about the curse, Perkins and the actor looked to Tom Hanks and his 1986 comedy The Money Pit while shaping some of the characters’ motivations in The Monkey. In a conversation with Bloody Disgusting, the director and his main star opened up about their Hanks-oriented thought process while working on the project.
Perkins explained: “The touchstone that I put to Theo was, ‘Remember when Tom Hanks was just the goofy everyman before he became the saviour of the world and everybody’s hero?’… He was just the goofy guy in Money Pit, for instance, a beleaguered Joe. When we laid into like, ‘Oh, yeah, we have shared affection for beleaguered Joe Tom Hanks,’ then that became code.”
James added: “Yeah, that was definitely a touch point. It was Tom Hanks in Money Pit, and I watched that film. Also, the style of comedy with Hal was the idea that he’s experienced it a lot. You always talked about how he’s not shocked all the time… He’s like, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, this is happening again.’ But then back to your point about the solidity of him, we also were keen to make him relatively real as possible, because if you make him too nonchalant, or too silly, or too knowing, as you said, with the wink in the eye, then the movie loses a bit of its heart, and it loses some of the stakes.”
The Monkey may not have been the fun horror follow-up to Longlegs that Perkins had been hoping for, but the most interesting thing about it might just be that a major part of it was inspired by Hanks. Hopefully, there will be many more horror flicks in the future influenced by Hanks’ body of work, and they’ll actually be good.
